CONCEPT IDEAS

The nature of my title ‘Exploring 3D Animation’ is very open and allows me to investigate the subject of 3D without tying myself down to certain ideas or methods to create my artefact. I decided from the start that I would set some rules to make the planning stage a little more focused. Firstly I decided that my film would feature at least one main character and that this character would be a robot. Secondly the robot would be based on a human bone structure, by this I mean have arms and legs. Apart from that I allowed myself complete freedom and imagination.

To create and demonstrate what I have learnt through exploring the digital art of 3D, my initial ideas would have to be realistic. In the beginning my ideas tended to lean towards cartoon-like drawings but I also explored more detailed styles mimicking certain artists like Pat Lee, famous for his manga – influenced Transformers drawings for the Dreamwave comic series. Please see below, ‘The Armies of Earth’ idea.

Soon after the research stage was underway I began to shy away from sketching Pixar influenced characters and developed a darker peculiar set of characters. The ideas I had ranged from many films (please see research, influences section). My research sparked lots of ideas and by looking at other artists and films I found how much similarity many famous characters have. Ss I have previously mentioned in my research, Pablo Picasso once said “Good artists copy, great artists steal” and I think this is extremely relevant. Most if not all artists and designers get inspired or influenced from other work and I am no exception. Sometimes it can be very valuable to copy a style and develop it into your own and by doing this new original ideas can sometimes emerge. Below are some of the initial ideas I had before I began finalizing a type of robot for the film.

ORIGINAL CONCEPTS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TIN BEAR -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tin Bear was the first developed concept I did. The story revolved around a robotic bear - like character that was abandoned by his creator and had been left in a locked barn house in the middle of nowhere. He finds no other choice but to commit suicide. The film would have followed his attempts at killing himself and his failing time after time. The story would have been predominantly sad but laced with black humour and a similar plot format to a Pixar short film

Why it was abandoned: I liked the plot of the story and the character but felt that I did not want to restrict my animation to one room and one character. A similar idea has probably been done before and it would have also been difficult to have made a room interesting for 4 or 5 minutes. The character would have definitely needed to be rigged (have a bone structure system) and at the time of the concept the notion of rigging was foreign to me. The plot did not require speech which was an advantage but it would have also required real physics (for all the suicide attempts, rope, gun, etc…) which I can now simulate with Reactor, but at the time did not understand.

THE ARMIES OF EARTH -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The concept behind this set of drawings is based on medieval Knights and their armour. Drawing inspiration from the bulkiness of their armour these ‘Knights’ are only the shell protecting the soldier within. So in essence people can fight with the robots as their weapons. ‘The Armies of Earth’ would be a small epic with thousands of robots fighting in the battle to reclaim earth.

With the perceived progression of technology it seemed natural to create Armour Plated Suits (APS) such as these as a realistic prospect for war. But unlike their predecessors these combatants are not individual; rather they are ‘assembly-lined’. That is to say they are mass-produced to fit within the complexities of a modern army. For example the standard infantry unit would be heavily armoured, carrying a standard issue weapon and would be part of a one hundred strong unit. Within all this technology the key element to the suits function is still the human inside the cockpit, who would be situated in the chest cavity. The human operator has total control over every aspect of the APS. This detail is crucial to the story of this concept idea.

The story of this concept is based on the invasion of Earth by an alien force sometime in the near future. The APSs were not created in response to the threat, but rather as an ever-present and ever-visible means of control in a now militaristic state. The robots would fight the alien force in an epic battle and some robots would succumb under the spell of the enemy and fight their own kind. The film would have begun with live footage filmed in London, mainly of grand buildings.

Why it was abandoned: The scale of this concept is immense, hence the reason why it was destined to remain at this ideas stage. However this scale was not totally out of reach, the use of identical suits would allow the reproduction of individual units to occur rather easily. Instead the main factor in shelving this project was the time it would take to render the masses of combatants required to justify this massive scale and the ability of my processor to cope with the high polygon characters. I was very interested in developing this idea but think that it would have been too difficult at this stage (the beginning!) of my exploration into 3D animation.

To view some of the 3D models from the planning stage please see the folder 'Appendices' folder on the DVD.